By helping Israel demolish what’s left of international legal constraint, the Iran war is hastening the dissolution of the Palestinian question.
Jonathan Shamir. March 24, 2026
IN 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—then a lawmaker in the Knesset—was working on A Place Among the Nations, a foundational text of his political ideology. In the book, written at a moment when the Palestinian cause was back on the international agenda amid the start of a partition process, Netanyahu sought to reframe the conflict as a broader civilizational struggle in a bid to justify Israel’s own rejectionism. “The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] is a Pan-Arab Trojan horse . . . that the Arabs have been trying to coax the West into accepting for over twenty years,” he wrote. Netanyahu’s contention was that Palestine was a symptom, not the cause, of Arab and Muslim hostility toward Israel, and that negotiating any territorial compromise with the PLO would be fruitless when it was actually external powers that had their hands on the reins: first the Soviet Union and Egypt, and now Iraq. In this telling, it was Saddam Hussein who was “the Middle East’s, and Israel’s, number one problem.”
But by the time of the book’s publication, the Gulf War and subsequent sanctions had already eliminated any threat Iraq could have posed. Netanyahu’s narrative was now urgently missing a compelling puppet master to frame as the “number one problem.” Netanyahu found his answer in Iran. Throughout the 1990s, he began casting Iran’s increased support of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah as evidence that two-state solution negotiations rooted in territorial concession would not bring peace. “Iran is the center of world terrorism today,” he wrote in 1996. By then, he was preaching to Congress that Iran was “the most dangerous” of the regimes in the Middle East. As with Iraq before it, Iran now served to lift the Palestinian question out of the colonial frame and into the civilizational one—taking it off the negotiating table and putting it onto the battlefield.
Today, three decades after he first cast Iran as the engine behind anti-Israel sentiment, Netanyahu has finally gotten his war. Israel posits the war as defense against an existential threat, but as ever, what is driving it is the impulse to suppress and displace the Palestine question. Seen this way, the Iran war once again reveals Israel’s most fundamental interest, which has remained unchanged for decades: to prosecute the question of Palestine on its own terms, whether through the continued system of apartheid or outright genocide. Netanyahu is once again proving that he would sooner redraw the map of the Middle East than push back Israel’s borders—preferring to crater Tehran and Isfahan than concede a single dunam in the West Bank.